meme: Ada Lovelace Day
Today (well, by the time I hit post) is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women in technology. Please join in!
I don't think we have to look any further than the huge, complex network of fandom and the Organization for Transformative Works to see that women have a huge impact on technology. But this posting is also about my personal history, and how I walked the road from English Major to a fifteen year (eep) career as a programmer and software release engineer.
When I logged onto my first BBS (Bulletin Board System) in November of 1991, I had some vague idea the Internet was something like Gordon R. Dixon's Final Encyclopedia-a giant satellite containing the sum of all human knowledge (yeah, I read too much SF in my youth.)
What I found instead were people, and what I've learned since then is people are what make the Internet worthwhile, for all I enjoy shopping on Amazon and researching the Yukon on maps.google.com.
But back then, the conversations were in plain text only, and I found in order to participate in these fascinating interactions, I had to learn the command-line OS (a variety of unix running on a VAX.) From that it was a small jump to writing shell scripts and participating in the local MUD (a text-based multi-user space where you create objects and program behaviors and your surroundings.)
Before I knew it, the BBS was offering me my first job in tech. And my very first boss was a woman. In fact, almost all of my bosses since then have been women-from CEOs to CFOs to Directors of Engineering--and I'm not sure if it's because women were more likely to hire a woman in a technical role, or I just plain lucked out.
But my tech heroes have always been women, and I never felt like I didn't belong-even when I was the only woman in a cave full of über-geeks-because of them.
Ada is such a hero: the very first programmer of the very first computer. And if it weren't for her, I wouldn't have been able to script the tagging of the first online daily newspaper (The SF Free Press), or painted polygons for the first multi-user VRML space, or helped build software that kills spam, spam, spam.
But that doesn't mean there isn't always, and still, a struggle. That's why this post. Women make important contributions in this industry every single day, every single hour. They are some of the best programmers we have. I've worked with many of them, and I acknowledge them now as having changed my life for the better.
I am a woman, I am a geek, and I have been in love with technology since the first time my dad bought himself some fancy new gadget and then tossed the manual to me, saying, "Figure this thing out."
Hey, Pops, I think we got it figured out.
I don't think we have to look any further than the huge, complex network of fandom and the Organization for Transformative Works to see that women have a huge impact on technology. But this posting is also about my personal history, and how I walked the road from English Major to a fifteen year (eep) career as a programmer and software release engineer.
When I logged onto my first BBS (Bulletin Board System) in November of 1991, I had some vague idea the Internet was something like Gordon R. Dixon's Final Encyclopedia-a giant satellite containing the sum of all human knowledge (yeah, I read too much SF in my youth.)
What I found instead were people, and what I've learned since then is people are what make the Internet worthwhile, for all I enjoy shopping on Amazon and researching the Yukon on maps.google.com.
But back then, the conversations were in plain text only, and I found in order to participate in these fascinating interactions, I had to learn the command-line OS (a variety of unix running on a VAX.) From that it was a small jump to writing shell scripts and participating in the local MUD (a text-based multi-user space where you create objects and program behaviors and your surroundings.)
Before I knew it, the BBS was offering me my first job in tech. And my very first boss was a woman. In fact, almost all of my bosses since then have been women-from CEOs to CFOs to Directors of Engineering--and I'm not sure if it's because women were more likely to hire a woman in a technical role, or I just plain lucked out.
But my tech heroes have always been women, and I never felt like I didn't belong-even when I was the only woman in a cave full of über-geeks-because of them.
Ada is such a hero: the very first programmer of the very first computer. And if it weren't for her, I wouldn't have been able to script the tagging of the first online daily newspaper (The SF Free Press), or painted polygons for the first multi-user VRML space, or helped build software that kills spam, spam, spam.
But that doesn't mean there isn't always, and still, a struggle. That's why this post. Women make important contributions in this industry every single day, every single hour. They are some of the best programmers we have. I've worked with many of them, and I acknowledge them now as having changed my life for the better.
I am a woman, I am a geek, and I have been in love with technology since the first time my dad bought himself some fancy new gadget and then tossed the manual to me, saying, "Figure this thing out."
Hey, Pops, I think we got it figured out.